On Wanting
One of my all time favorite poems is Mary Oliver describing a kingfisher diving into water after a fish: "hunger is the only story / he has ever heard in his life that he could believe."
I return to that image often in my work with couples because wanting — the hunger itself — is so woven into what it means to be alive. We only cease to hunger when we cease to be.
Which is why it matters so much when people lose the thread back to what they want.
Desire discrepancy is one of the most common issues couples bring to therapy. Usually it arrives framed as a mismatch: one partner wants more or a different kind of sex, the other wants it less or not at all, or wishes they wanted it. There's a gap, and the gap has become a source of distance, hurt, and sometimes shame. The higher-desire partner feels rejected, confused, sometimes invisible. The lower-desire partner feels pressured, broken, guilty. Both feel alone in a way that's hard to name.
The standard approach to desire discrepancy tends to be symptomatic: Are you experiencing pain? Here are some options. Vaginal dryness? Try lubricant. Trouble with arousal? Let's look at what's happening physiologically. Is there the right kind of stimulation in the right place for the right amount of time?
All of this is valid and necessary. The body matters. Pain matters. Physiology matters. But treating the symptom, however skillfully, doesn't always address what's underneath it.
The question I find myself asking isn't "how do we close the gap?" It's: what happened to your wanting?
Not "why don't you want sex more often." Something quieter and more specific than that. When did you last feel desire that you recognized as yours — not obligatory, not performed, not a response to your partner's need? Can you remember what that felt like? Do you trust it when it shows up?
Often partners have been so busy managing the gap — apologizing for it, defending against it, trying to close it — that they've lost contact with the interior thing itself.
Desire is not a performance metric. It's not something you produce on schedule to meet a relational obligation. And it's not something your partner makes happen for you, though we often speak of it that way. As if attraction were something another person either creates or fails to create. As if wanting were entirely out of our hands.
This is one of the most common misunderstandings about desire: that it lives outside us, in the other person, and we’re waiting to be activated. When it isn't activated, we conclude something has gone wrong — with the relationship, with our partner, with ourselves.
But desire lives inside. It can be muted, buried, confused, or frightened into silence — but it originates in the self. The question of what happened to it is always, at some level, an interior one.
Sex researchers distinguish between two kinds of desire worth understanding here. Spontaneous desire is what most of us picture when we think of wanting: it arises unbidden, before any sexual encounter begins. You find yourself thinking about sex, feeling drawn toward your partner, initiating. This is the model we absorb from culture — movies, advertising, the implicit story that love produces desire automatically and continuously.
Responsive desire works differently. It doesn't precede the encounter; it emerges within it. Someone with responsive desire may rarely think about sex during the day, may almost never initiate, and may not feel particularly drawn toward their partner from across the room. But once there's touch, presence, attention — desire shows up. It was always there; it needed conditions to emerge.
This distinction is useful and can release a tremendous amount of shame — for the person who assumed their low initiation meant something was wrong with them, and for the partner who took it to mean something was wrong with the relationship. But I want to push a little further, because the spontaneous/responsive distinction can become its own kind of symptom management if we stop there. Knowing which type of desire you have doesn't automatically reconnect you to it. Because the real question isn't what type of desire you have. It's whether you can feel it freely.
Here is what I see happen in relationships, usually without anyone intending it. Over time, desire becomes less free. One partner says no — genuinely, honestly — and the other receives it as rejection. The hurt is real. The next time the lower-desire partner considers saying no, they're not just deciding whether they want sex. They're also managing their partner's feelings, protecting the relationship, protecting themselves, trying to avoid another round of distance and repair. The no becomes harder to say. And when the no becomes harder to say, something quiet but consequential happens to the yes: it becomes less trustworthy. Less theirs.
Emily Nagoski, in her book Come As You Are, describes the body's sexual response system as having both a gas pedal and a brake. Desire lives in the balance between them. Obligation, pressure, the fear of disappointing a partner — these are brakes, and they are powerful ones. The partner who feels they cannot say an honest no will find their brakes are always on, even when they don't understand why. They may genuinely want to want. But wanting under pressure is a different thing from wanting freely.
A partner has to be able to say an honest no in order to say an honest yes. And if the no isn't safe — if it’s met with sulking, shutting down or escalating pressure — then the yes cannot be trusted either. Both people are left in a kind of relational fog, unable to read their own instruments clearly.
This is the stalemate I see most often. Not a lack of attraction, not incompatibility, but a loss of freedom — the freedom to feel what you actually feel and say what you actually mean. Recovering desire, in this sense, isn't primarily about technique or frequency. It's about rebuilding the conditions under which honest wanting becomes possible again.
That's the territory I'm interested in exploring. Not desire discrepancy as a mechanical problem with mechanical solutions, but wanting itself: what it is, where it goes, what it needs to survive inside the long-term intimacy of a shared life.
There are no quick answers here, and I won't pretend otherwise. But there is something worth sitting with in the question: what happened to your wanting? Not as a crisis, not as a diagnosis, but as a genuine inquiry — the kind that, followed honestly, tends to lead somewhere true.
Mary Oliver's kingfisher doesn't deliberate. He dives. Hunger is the only story, and it's enough. We are more complicated than kingfishers, and that complication is both our difficulty and our gift. We get to ask the question. We get to look for the answer.
That, I think, is where the work begins.
The Kingfisher
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your
whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the
water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could
believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the
silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and
easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
-Mary Oliver, The House of Light (1990)
